drag and drop rearrangeable lists as a form element!
It's heavy-weight, fragile, lots of implementations are framework-specific, and most of them are horribly buggy, but it's nonetheless a must-have feature in many cases. It'd be a great candidate for better support in the browser, generally, if we're going to insist on using it as an application platform.
I don't remember having that last time I had to implement serious drag and drop, about 4 years ago.
This just made me laugh because it is so true. I thought it was just my stupid luck that I keep working with companies obsessed with drag and drop. But you are right. I have seen companies blow hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing drag and drop on a trivial feature. The same company will then complain about spending a few thousand dollars implementing a security feature or implementing training programs to teach employees about the importance of securely handling PII.
Edit: PII = Personal Identifiable Information (social security numbers, credit cards, birthdates, etc).
You are both right. Drag and drops are incredibly intuitive for users. It feels natural to most people and is easy for many of them to use.
But the parent comment is also right because drag and drops are not very USABLE. Meaning that if someone is using a screen reader or an unusual device (phone, kiosk, kindle, etc) the drag and drop functionality may not work well for them or might not work at all. It might be INTUITIVE on what the user is supposed to do, but it isn't USABLE. We have all encountered non-usable interfaces that we simply can not interact with for various reasons. This also becomes a concern for accessibility. A screen reader may not be able to read it to someone who is blind. An older device might not be able to display or operate the drag-able functionality. A user that relies on something like "Voice Control" may not be able to use your drag-and-drop system.
Ideally you would do both. You could show an interface that has up and down arrows for each item to move items manually. But also make those elements drag-able if users choose that option. But this takes more and more development time. That is the constant battle between software engineers and decision makers. Anything is possible with enough development time, but decision makers are quick to move developers along when the item is "good enough", which generally means the feature works on the decision-maker's devices.